Journal
Some ideas, advice, information and the occasional rant
2Mar
This week saw the launch of Safari 4 beta and as a PC user this would normally pass me by without much thought. However with Safari 3 making the transition to Windows the browser is securing its place as a major player in the browser market irrespective of operating system.
Within the web community Safari has always been a popular choice due to its quick adoption of web technologies and of course being preinstalled on Apple computers which are the ultimate fashion statement for any web geek. As a PC user though I have rarely used the desktop version of the browser outside of testing purposes but must admit version 4 has some nice additions.
Most of Safari 4’s new features are workflow and UI improvements, with the native Windows chrome getting the most coverage, but the feature I have been most interested in is the Developer Tools. Now fully integrated into the browser the Developer Tools are essentially Firebug for Safari with many features present that it’s Firefox cousin boasts but with some nice extras that require extra plugins in Firefox. The presence of this feature will make browser testing and optimisation much easier but having to open the Web Inspector and then dock it to the main window every time you open Safari could get tiresome. Hopefully as Safari moves towards its full release the option to do this as default may appear.
Although the browser is certainly a step in the right direction and may arguably be the best available I will be sticking to Firefox as my main browser. This isn’t because Firefox or its plugins are any better than what is available elsewhere but it’s the fact that it’s all in one place. I have a browser set to my preferences, with the right plugins, settings and bookmarks as well as the knowledge of how to use the browser that all together gives me what I need to do my job quickly and effectively.
24Feb
In the last few weeks I’ve been getting that itch that a lot of website designers get to redesign my own website. It was back in May 2008 that I last redesigned my website, creating something I was finally pleased with as pretty much all previous versions of the website had problems in design, content and construction.
Unlike every previous time I’ve wanted to redesign I’m actually still pretty happy with what I have; it works in the most part and still looks good. For this reason I don’t want to throw everything out and completely redesign the site but I do want to make some changes and streamline some of the site. Some might say I want to realign the site, although what I have in mind may sit somewhere between the two.
Continue reading “To design or not to design”
19Feb
About a week ago I got the email about FeedBurner becoming fully integrated into Google and to be honest I didn’t read it in much depth but I did see the part where if I did nothing my feeds would become inactive by the end of February, not something I wanted to happen.
Given that I haven’t used FeedBurner in months and remembering the hassle involved in integrating it the last time I thought I’d just drop it and go back to the standard setup. However naively I thought after the couple of changes required that my feeds would continue to work as normal, however this may not be the case for everyone.
Unfortunately some people’s feed will no longer be working; apologies. I’ve looked into a couple of solutions to try and resurrect the old feed in the short term while people move across to the new feed but after a couple of attempts nothing appeared to be working. For this reason I have to ask that anyone wishing to keep up to date with the feed update their reader with the URL below:
http://www.keanrichmond.com/feed
I know how frustrating it can be to have to update feeds when sites decide to change them on a whim and although I have no crystal ball to see into the future I hope that this won’t happen again in the future.
Apologies,
Kean
15Feb
Something that I’ve always hated in some of the website’s I build is the lack of visual interest in the internal pages of a website. These pages tend to follow a standard layout with a long trail of visually boring content running down the page. To solve this problem I’ve started using Photoshop more to create composite images of the internal pages of a website to ensure they have more visual interest than what would occur when styling the internal of a site based predominantly on the style of the home page.
The problem this created is that with more unique layouts and styles from page to page I would have to write more CSS for more id’s and classes. That was until I started using page specific body id’s.
Continue reading “Page specific design made easy with body id’s”